


but the body goes on living

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 10:51:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6655075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Redcliffe castle, a future that wasn't, and an experience of death that very much was. </p><p>Dorian kills without a spell for the first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but the body goes on living

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Iambic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iambic/gifts).
  * Inspired by [no reason left to stay (that's why we're leaving)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3582336) by [Iambic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iambic/pseuds/Iambic). 



> This is a switched POV version, with permission, of chapter 5 of Iambic's amazing _no reason left to stay_ , in which Dorian walks away again and again, until he doesn't. There was a conversation on Twitter about flipping the perspective on scenes from our own stories, and then James and I got carried away and went for each other's instead. You may well need the original for context; I promise you, it'll be no hardship at all.

Red and red and red. It grows from the walls like sickness, like a slow death consuming the castle. The cavities of the walls rot away, filled with whispering red; it pierces the flesh from the inside out. Soon there will be a ruined corpse, fit only for a necromancer to raise.

Dorian, thinking of Felix, swallows against nausea.

Oh, it isn't real; he can't allow it to be real. If it were real he would be paralysed by it.

The Bull, that great Qunari mercenary who had mistrusted him and his good looks so terribly, is a ruin now too. Dorian, who cannot heal bodies but knows them intimately, would be able to feel the wrongness of the thing without the red sheen to the Bull's eye, the warping of his voice. 

He seems beyond mistrust now. Beyond tiredness. He too is dying from the inside out.

Dorian needles, because what else is there to do? Nothing to win by speaking the obvious. But he gets no rise, regardless.

The Bull says: You have Adaar's back, I'll have yours.

The Bull says: Pretty forward of you.

Outside of Redcliffe, on their way to this wretched trap, the Bull had laughed uproariously at his own jokes, at the innuendo offered by the elf who he thinks was called Sera. Now he is flat. A marionette in his own likeness, perhaps, going through the motions.

Every shred of his energy reserved for fighting. Perhaps.

Dorian kills, and kills, and kills. Fire and lightning. Laughs because nobody else will, because he cannot stand the somber, oppressively funereal atmosphere. Mourns, all the same, because nobody else will do that either. Slaves in armour, thrown out to die in a war they never asked for. Touches them with spirits, but gently, for peace only. They will not rise. They deserve that courtesy.

Leliana hates him for it, the laughter and the delicate care both. 

It hardly matters.

He says: It's difficult to hate someone who never had a choice.

Sera mutters.

The Bull, watchful, says nothing. His scrutiny itches at Dorian more than all the words and looks of the others combined. He is measured.

What is the shape of him, then, through this tired, dying version of the Bull's sharp eye?

Red, and red, and finally it comes down to blood—of course it would. A desperate swing of his staff to keep a blade from the Bull's back. Blood on his hands and blood on his face, hot and thin. The scrape of bone against the edge of his blade as he withdraws it from a throat. From a body. Fourth cervical vertebra. Hyoid.

And the blood—the blood—

For the first time since they fell through time into this nightmare, Dorian trembles.

A horrible physicality, wrenching. He knows death. He knows bodies. These things are his trade. He has cut bloodless dead flesh with a sharp knife, precision, learning the shape of the thing. He would never admit to it in the south; who outside of an assassin's guild would do such a perverse thing? He has understood that even they are circumspect about the practice—

The line of reason is a defense.

The one is utterly unlike the other.

The last time another person's blood touched him was—

No, no, let it lie.

And the Bull sees him. Of course the Bull sees him; it is the Bull for whom he bloodied his hands, and so they are as close as a breath. The heat of the Bull's body is intense, unhealthy, an almost burning thing. Dorian had found him so attractive in that other, realer world. Against his better judgement, as he thought. Now, he only aches.

What words are said to him? He hardly understands. 

It only matters that words are said.

Time flows again. Relentless, onward. Away from the moment.

Time is not a straight line. But pretend, for this alone, that it is.

Calm. Only bodies.

Dorian is only a body. A thing of beating blood, of bone that a blade might scrape brutally against on the withdrawal.

The Bull says: Never killed a man without a spell, have you?

To argue is only formality, only a token offering to the hot shame he feels at this moment of weakness.

And there is a moment—there, there, with Dorian on the edge of panic—when the Bull's gaze softens. For the first time. Not blank, tired neutrality, but a flicker of—can it be—sympathetic understanding?

Absurdly, Dorian thinks: the real Bull will never see this moment.

Absurdly, he thinks: I don't want to see this Bull die.

Is that why, in the end, after he has faltered and failed and survived all the same, he turns away? Away from Leliana, from the door slammed open, from a glimpse of a horn which he thinks is not a demon's.

Call it necessity, instead. Call it a need for focus, in the desperate fumbling struggle of working magic which ought to be impossible, which he knows only as theoretical treatises, albeit ones penned by his own hand.

Know, all the same, that one lies. That he flinches from the moment of the Bull's death as he flinched from Alexius', from the sight of the shell that was once his friend Felix.

He doesn't understand what it means. He has no time to weigh it, in the rush of it all—can only walk away, back into a world where the sky is blue and the walls of the castle are bare stone and Alexius, horrified and defeated, breathes.

Where the Bull watches him, with his eye narrowed in suspicion, and doesn't know.


End file.
